Under the hood, we’ve been busy. We’re starting conversion of Computers & Technology. As with other departments, this is an intensely manual process, one page at a time. We’re proceeding more or less alphabetically, and have a nebulous goal of completing even the Writing department by the end of 2008.

Schema: Generally, old HTML web pages of “about a page or so” length get converted into a WordPress “post”, sorted by original publication date. Indexing is done on the department page itself, by “Category”, “most recent”, “Tag clouds”, or the ever-popular Search field.

Old multi-page HTML “books” (framesets linking several related pages in a major or feature article) do not get converted. Instead, links to them are provided within WordPress as “Pages” in the right-hand menu.

“Tag Clouds” are features that exploit a WordPress function allowing the author to assign descriptive “tags” to articles. They can be much more specific than “Categories”, functioning more like “keywords” to assist in categorizing and searching for articles in related topics, like “audio”, “disasters”, “dubious spokespersons”, and so forth. Each Department has its own set of Tags and Categories, and functions independently from other departments. Tag collections are called “Clouds” because more frequently used tags are presented in a larger font. Rarely-used Tags are presented in a small font.

Not all departments will use Tags; Tags don’t make a lot of sense for “What’s New” for example as “Categories” are more than specific enough. We started using Tags in “Photo Notes”. We found it really useful for finding photos by topic – especially since photo postings don’t have a lot of searchable text!